Remember floppy disks? Here's what modern digital storage would look like in the physical world

A 3.5-inch floppy disk holds 1.4MB of data, which is equivalent to 280 pages of A4 paper filled with size 10 font, according to a new study

Floppy Disks won't hold much data these days

In the digital world we take storage space for granted . But a new study has calculated just how much space our megabytes and gigabytes would take up if transferred to the real world.

For example, a 3.5-inch floppy disk holds 1.4MB of data, which is equivalent to 280 pages of A4 paper filled with size 10 font.

The 128GB version of Apple's iPhone 6s can hold a lot more - the equivalent of 12,800 storage boxes, each one containing 2,000 A4 pages full of text. That's 12,600,000 sheets of paper.

Meanwhile the online resource Wikipedia boasts 33 terabytes of data - which works out to 3,300,000 storage boxes of paper. If laid end-to-end, the storage boxes would stretch from New York City to Chicago. Their combined weight would be almost as much as the Eiffel Tower.

"We gathered information about the storage capacities of various digital databases from various sources and converted these databases into sheets of paper by using the conversion of 1 byte to 1 character, fitting 5,000 characters (5KB) onto a sheet of paper using size 10 font and adjusted margins," explained the team at tech insight company Better Buys.

"We then visualized the “length” of these databases by imagining these sheets of paper were placed into 15-inch-long storage boxes and lined up end to end.

"The length of these boxes was then converted into feet, miles, and eventually light years. We then used a variety of known distances as a comparison of how long these boxes would stretch."

Other interesting calculations include that all of Facebook's online data would amount to 30,000,000,000 storage boxes, and would stretch from the Earth to the moon.

Google goes even further. The search giant's 15 exabytes (EB) of data would fill 1,500,000,000,000 storage boxes full of paper.

That would stretch to the Sun, back to Earth, back to the Sun, and almost back to Earth again.

So if you think your inbox is cluttered now, just be thankful that you don't have to file everything away on paper anymore.

Source: Mirror UK